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Sixtus shrugged. “On the whole, public opinion runs against that sort of thing, but there are ways and ways of dealing with public opinion. I knew a man in Antioch who was supposed to boil his slaves, but his feasts were never thin of company. He had an excellent cook, entertained lavishly—and one could never complain of the service. And then, in the crowd Quindarvis runs with—”

“Weren’t you shocked?” Marcus interrupted weakly, recalling the old man reclining in the midst of that blazing firefall of vice, the rescued child huddled at his feet.

Sixtus replied mildly, “I am never shocked.”

Marcus sighed and shut his eyes. His body felt like one vast ache, sinking slowly back into unconsciousness.

“Marcus,” said the old man. “What Arrius said about Tertullia Varia...”

Without opening his eyes, he said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“The Christians would not do such a thing. Believe me, they would not.”

At least the Christians Anthony and Josephus had made sure that he came to no harm. “But it makes sense,” objected Marcus, feeling as though he spoke from a great distance away. With a bitter chuckle, he added, “It’ll make sense to her father.”

“That is why she must be found before he returns to Rome. Listen to me, Marcus. Do you love this girl?”

He opened his eyes, looked up at that robed white figure that seemed so tall against the light of the window, the sun-riven face and scarred soldier’s hands. “Does it matter if I do?” he asked hopelessly. “Arrius is right. I’m a philosopher—or anyway that’s what I’ve chosen to call myself. At least I can look at the truth. The least I can do is—is school my mind to bear it.”

Sixtus asked him, “And what is the truth?”

He forced his cracked voice steady. “That she’s dead. By their hand, or by her father’s, after.”

“That isn’t truth,” said the old man. “It’s only the comfort of despair, to keep your heart from hurting.”

Anger flared into him at these words, but there was no reply that he could make to them. He lay back, deathly weary.

Sixtus went on, “Despair is so much easier to bear than hope, Marcus. The truth is that we do not know the truth. Do you truly love this girl enough to marry her?”

Marcus was silent for a long time, looking within himself for the truth. Not any philosophical truth, but simply truth about himself. He finally said, “I don’t know. I think so, but—I won’t know until I see her. If she won’t have me, if she thinks I’m taking her out of pity...”

“Would you take her out of pity?”

He started to deny it, then stopped himself. “I don’t know that, either,” he said after a moment. “I’d like to think I wouldn’t so insult her, but—I don’t know.”

Sixtus nodded, not seeming to demand an answer, having once made Marcus aware of the question. He said, “It’s still four days until the prefect is expected back. She may be found tonight, or tomorrow night—You will have time to think. The city prefect may be stiff-necked and intolerant, but if we can face him with his living daughter and some viable alternative fate, I doubt that he will be able to harm her in cold blood.” He limped to the wall, and found his staff leaning in a corner. “Hold to hope, Marcus. In default of knowledge it is all we have, and in some cases it can be greater than knowledge.”

Supporting himself on his staff, he limped from the room and was gone.

Though the siesta hour was largely past, Marcus remained where he was, his body aching so badly he wasn’t sure he could have got up if he’d wanted to. He listened to the voices of the children in the court outside, the women arguing back and forth across their tiny balconies, the thundering gallop of periodic footsteps up and down the halls. He wondered if it was possible to hope.

“Do you truly love this girl enough to marry her?” Marcus looked around the broiling, dingy single room, with its single small chest, containing his precious philosophical scrolls, that a couple of planks had converted to a table, its narrow third-hand bed, its few rickety stools. The whole place looked dirty and sordid. No different from how it had always looked, of course, but now he felt impatient with it.
Whether I married her or not,
he thought,
I certainly wouldn’t want to bring her here. When this is over, I’ll have to do something about that.
Just what, he wasn’t sure, but it was in the back of his mind that, if asked, Sixtus could help him somehow.

“Hold to hope...” It was hardly the counsel of a philosopher. The Stoics said, “Train your mind to accept what is, and unflinchingly meet Fate.” Better advice, maybe; aside from being grossly emotionalistic and illogical, hope was exhausting. But altogether an odd sort of advice for a philosopher to give.

But then, Sixtus himself had admitted that before he had ever begun his studies of philosophy, he had been crippled in that pursuit by the knowledge that in every human soul lurks the potential for unknowable evil. No wonder the old man had become a hermit, thought Marcus, watching through the window as the sunlight moved slowly up the cracked stucco of the courtyard wall.

Tomorrow night was the summer solstice. If they could find her by then...

“The sacrifice is an important one,” Tiridates had said to his slave. “And doubly so now.”

Why doubly so? Because it would mark Tullia’s initiation into their rites? Because having once sacrificed, there would be no way out for her?

Someone scratched at the doorframe. From the hall a hesitant voice called out, “Silanus? Marcus Silanus?”

He made a move to rise and instantly sank back again, his teeth gritted. Then he yelled back, “I’m coming,” and levered himself very carefully off his bed, found his tunic, and pulled it stiffly on as he limped to the door.

The face of the thin, somewhat bent middle-aged Jew standing politely in the darkness of the hallway was vaguely familiar to him, but the memory was unclear. Maybe it wasn’t that sharp vinegary face at all that he recalled, but one like it...

“Symmachus? Isaac Symmachus?” He stood aside, to let the stooping gentleman pass.

“You remember,” he said, and entered the room with that same hesitant gait, almost a limp, that Marcus recalled from that one flaming scene he had witnessed in the shaded porches of the Basilica Ulpias. His voice, which had been little more than a screech of rage then, was bitter and husky. “I almost wish you didn’t.”

“You’ll have to excuse my housekeeping,” murmured Marcus—his usual apology to anyone who entered his lodgings—as he dumped piled clothes off his one backless chair. The man’s diffidence so embarrassed him that he added, “I’ve had enough rows with my own father about my philosophy I don’t think I should have been surprised to learn Judah had them, too.”

“I daresay,” murmured Symmachus. “But I misdoubt your father ever came storming up to you during one of your philosophical discussions and tried to seize you and drag you bodily back to his house. I—was angry,” he added quietly, folding his pale thin clerk’s hands, with their soft wrinkles and smutches of ink and chalk dust. Then he looked up again, his sharp dark eyes bitter, “Though why anyone expects their anger to excuse such actions I have never understood.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Marcus, seating himself on one of the other stools. “How is Judah? I haven’t seen him since he—he left philosophy.”

There was a moment’s awkward silence, the elderly Jew staring down at his linked fingers, his oddly sensitive mouth thinned in an expression that reminded Marcus tremendously of his friend’s. Finally he said, “Neither have I.”

Marcus looked up quickly.

“Oh, he still lived beneath the ancestral roof, for a bit. He was seldom home. I should have known that ending his course of studies among the pagans wouldn’t kill whatever worm it was that gnawed at his heart. A wicked and iniquitous generation, but—my son. They say, ‘Do not rebuke the scorner, for he will hate you.’ And in the end he left, of course.” The skin over the fine knuckles paled momentarily. “I heard from him once. I only wondered if you had.” He did not meet Marcus’ eyes as he spoke. It was enough, thought Marcus, that he would have to be asking strangers—and gentiles, to boot—the whereabouts of his own son.

“No,” he said gently. “But then—I knew Judah. I guessed, when he quit coming, that he wouldn’t flout your will.”

“You mean you guessed that his straight-laced, stiff-necked old father had succeeded in harrying and chivying a promise from him to give up the heathen delights of the philosophy of the Greeks? Something I daresay yours never did?” And the dark bitter eyes traveled slowly over the shabby room.

“It isn’t quite the same,” said Marcus, though in his heart he knew it was. He realized Caius had been right: There is truth and truth. He could hardly tell this grieving man that he had indeed been responsible for his only son’s desertion. “For one thing, our circumstances are different. I’m not my father’s only son. And I’m a Roman citizen. My father may consider philosophy unmanly, but not unclean. Judah told me once that the philosophy of the Greeks, to your people, was about one step above pork chitterlings for dinner.”

Symmachus made a sort of hoarse squeaking sound deep in his throat, a bitter chuckle, or a desperate attempt to suppress tears. “‘A foolish son is a grief to his father, and bitterness to her that bore him.’ And they say also that if you beat your child, he will not die, but if you beat him you may deliver his soul from hell. And to hell, I fear, he has gone, and will drag us all with him.” Perhaps for concealment, he leaned his lips against his knotted hands. “He has become a Christian.”

For a moment Marcus did not know if he wanted to weep or burst into uncontrollable peals of laughter. He wondered if his friend, the only other one of Timoleon’s students to whom he had felt drawn, had been one of the men who had dragged Tullia from her litter the other night. He wondered if he would meet him that night in the catacombs.

When Marcus made no response to his words, Symmachus looked bleakly up again. “I understand his—his seeking of them. He was impatient with the Law, and angry with all things. He asked what our nation is, now that the temple is gone; what are we, now that our land is destroyed. To Jews, Christianity is something different than it is to those who do not understand the Law. To a Jew turned Christian it is flower and fruit, which justifies the long waiting of the vine. I understand Judah’s impatience... but I’m afraid for him, Marcus Silanus. I’m afraid for us all.”

Startled out of the hellish irony of his reflections, Marcus heard the real fear in the dry thin voice. “Why?”

“You haven’t heard? This girl who was taken...”

“What?”

“It is noised all over the town,” said the Jew, his brows, thick and surprisingly dark, meeting suddenly over the hooked nose, “that the Christians stole a girl—that they’ll sacrifice her to their dead god—which is absurd, since not even the most degenerate offshoot of my faith would admit of human sacrifice—”

“What? No, wait—How did it get all over town?”

The Jew sniffed. “My son told me a pagan story once, about a man who whispered a secret into a hole in the ground, and the very reeds that grew from the earth whispered it to the wind, who bore the disgraceful tale through the world. I found chalked on my door this morning, ‘Baby-Eater’; the Forum buzzes with nothing else. After the escape of the Christians from the prison in the night there is talk of a general hunt. Rumors are flying in my neighborhood. My fellow clerks in the treasury have likewise found their symbols—the cross and the fish—chalked upon their doors, with curses and lewd words. To Jews and Christians the differences between us are obvious, but to the Greeks and the Romans, and the scum that crowd this city like maggots in the belly of a rotting dog, Jews and Christians are very much the same.”

Marcus shivered, knowing the old man was right. He remembered how in the courtyard of Quindarvis last night the two terms had been used interchangeably by the bearers and linkboys. With sudden enlightenment, he realized old Sixtus’ anxieties over the dangers to the innocent. Of course, he thought. Sixtus was a soldier, and an imperial governor. There can’t be much of the uttermost depths of human brute folly and ignorance that he hasn’t seen. He understood long ago what a general persecution would mean to the families of the Christians.

It was on the tip of his tongue to warn Symmachus about the raid on the catacombs, to tell him to beware. But what, after all, could the frail, bitter little clerk do to protect himself or the other members of his family? And if by some chance he did meet his son that day, it would ruin all hopes for saving Tullia. So he only said, “I haven’t seen him, not since he left Timoleon. But if I do, or if I hear of him, I’ll tell him you’re seeking him.”

“Always that,” sighed the father, and rose stiffly to his feet. “In my youth I prayed for a brilliant son with an ardent spirit, like a lion that roars and is not afraid. How the Lord, who sees all the future, must have laughed to grant me my desire. Better I had prayed for a son with the brains and the spirit of a willing ass.” He moved toward the door, and Marcus was uneasily conscious of how thin he was, how fragile his long clerkish hands, how brittle his body. He looked very breakable. He had seen the rack, in the dark hole under the Capitoline prison. Those old bones would come apart like overcooked meat.

The old Jew went on, “Judah is proud, proud as Satan. After he left Timoleon he would not seek out his friends that he knew there.” He sighed. “I must go. With the audits and the changes in the offices of the praetors, we are working by lamplight these nights, even though the men we work for wallow like hogs in wine. If you see my son, tell him that this is where I am.”

“All right.” The shadows had begun to fold down over that hot little room. Knowing where he would go tonight, Marcus dreaded the thought of meeting Judah Symmachus.

Those dark burning eyes rested on him briefly, curious. “You have left Timoleon yourself, then? I sought you there yesterday and today.”

Marcus paused, his mouth open to speak, and then nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I’ve left Timoleon.”

Symmachus pursed his lips for a moment, then sighed and took his leave. Marcus heard his footsteps retreat down the hall, stiff and halting and old, as though weighted down by an unsupportable burden of care.